Mother's Day: I Remember Mama (1948) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Warner Brothers

Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award and two-time Academy Award winning director George Stevens, the industry man behind such major screen epics as Shane, The Diary of Anne Frank, Gunga Din, Swing Time, A Place in the Sun and Giant more than proved his worth as one of the true original masters of the Golden Age of Hollywood.  Starting out in Hal Roach Studios shooting Laurel and Hardy shorts before working his way up through Universal Pictures and then RKO where he directed Katherine Hepburn in Alice Adams before joining the Allied Forces in WWII before unveiling the short wartime documentary Nazi Concentration Camps in 1945.  As a net result of his tour of duty in the service, his films became decidedly more serious in tone and only a few years later did he direct the 1948 Norwegian immigrant family dramedy I Remember Mama, a stage-to-screen favorite that later inspired the hit CBS television series Mama which lasted about eight seasons.
 
A story passed on through varying adaptations and iterations, starting with Kathryn Forbes’ novel Mama’s Bank Account which was turned into a stage play dubbed I Remember Mama by John Van Druten and then adapted for the screen by DeWitt Bodeen, the film told in flashback in a series of vignettes being penned by the Hanson family’s eldest daughter Katrin (Barbara Bel Geddes of Vertigo) and her memories of living in 1910 San Francisco with her mother Marta (Irene Dunne), papa Lars (Philip Dorn), brother Nels (Steve Brown) and little sister Dagmar (June Hedin).  Told over the course of several decades, we meet Marta’s sister Trina (Ellen Corby) and their two curmudgeonly busybody sisters Sigrid (Edith Evanson) and Jenny (Hope Landin) as well as the lovable drunken boorish Uncle Chris Halvorsen (a wonderful Oscar Homolka). 
 
A simple slice-of-life family dramedy largely about a poor family of immigrants scraping by for survival, including but not limited to allowing a broke lodger named Jonathan Hyde (Sir Cedric Hardwicke) read Charles Dickens to the children at night, the saga is complicated by young Dagmar’s mastoiditis which the family can just barely afford hospitalization and surgery for.  Due to hospital safety protocols for the patients, mother Marta is forbade from seeing her daughter Dagmar and goes as far as to sneak into the hospital as a cleaning woman who won’t be kept apart from her child.  Most of the film, running at a sizable length of 134 minutes, plays in this fashion with a series of recurring episodic asides peppering the family’s lives all under the careful guard and heart of Marta.

 
Exquisitely shot by Val Lewton cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca the eye behind Cat People and Out of the Past, Musuraca’s images landed the cameraman his first Academy Award nomination.  Largely filmed in the interior walls of the home life when it doesn’t crawl on its hands and knees through the dimly lit nighttime quarters of the hospital, I Remember Mama looks handsome and accurately reflects the tight, occasionally squalid lifestyle lived by this family of poor Norwegian immigrants.  

The soundtrack, again, includes a Val Lewton regular named Roy Webb who scored everything from Stranger on the Third Floor to Cat People though here he dials down the thriller aspect in favor of a swelling emotional score that will tug at the heartstrings.  Though they didn’t win, all four of the main leading actors from Mama played brilliantly by Irene Dunne under some slight makeup augmentation, Oscar Homolka, Barbara Del Geddes and Ellen Corby each received Oscar nominations for their acting while Corby went on to win a Golden Globe for the same.  An ensemble piece largely anchored by Irene Dunne with some arresting supporting performances, nobody in this immigrant family homelife show misses a beat!

 
Despite the accolades and critical reception, being among the few films with multiple acting award nominations to not also secure a Best Picture nom, I Remember Mama with its carefree almost cozy slice-of-life journey through poverty’s ups and downs costs too much money to make and as a result underperformed at the box office.  Slated at around $3 million, a lot for 1948, the film lost almost a million dollars.  Still, the charm and reputation of I Remember Mama only grew with the emergence of the CBS TV show Mama starring Peggy Wood in the role of Marta.  Also the film spawned a brief cast reunion with Irene Dunne, Oscar Homolka and Babara Del Geddes reprising their roles for radio broadcast and sometime in the early 1960s there was a British television broadcast version of the play.

 
Looking back at it years later, while not one of George Stevens’ strongest pictures (look at A Place in the Sun or Shane and there’s no comparison) it did usher in some terrific performances and helped pave the way for one of America’s most popular television shows of the 1950s, so popular it even garnered a theatrical re-release of Stevens’ film.  Yes the film is a bit on the longer side than it needed to be which might’ve been part in parcel to the film’s poor box office returns, but as such it is one of the quintessential Mother’s Day movies, a film that doesn’t just make you remember Marta ‘Mama’ Hanson but all mothers in a film that is ostensibly a drama yet plays out like a collective of fond familial memories.  Not wholly unlike rifling through a family album while also trying to convey the immigrant experience and home life adapting to an America still in the throes of finding itself.

--Andrew Kotwicki